Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Editing and Printing Graphics as a Blind User

Mike Sivill is a blind employee here at ViewPlus Technologies. This is what he had to say about how he used a Tiger embosser to see the coloration of his new dog guide! Read along to see how easy it is for a blind person to emboss a graphic!

"I just got my new dog guide about a month ago. The training school sent me her picture so I could show my friends and family what she looks like. I wanted to emboss a copy for myself on my Tiger embosser, so I brought up a new Word document and brought the picture into it via the Insert menu. I checked the dimensions of the picture first to be sure it would fill up the page. I hit shift + left arrow to select it, pressed the key to open the context menu, and arrowed down to "format picture." Next, I arrowed left to the "size" tab and noticed that the dimensions were only 3.35 by 3.99. I didn't want a tiny 4 by 4 inch picture because I wanted it to be as large as possible to feel as much as I could, but I didn't want to warp the dimensions of the picture in the process. To do this, I tabbed down to the edit boxes where height and width are adjustable by percentage and I upped it to 200%. When I shift tabbed back to the dimension they were 6.71" and 7.98", pretty good, for 8-1/2 by 11 paper. Since this was fine I hit OK and went back into the main Word document. When I printed it came out like a giant black square. It felt like a napkin pattern rather than a German Shepherd dog. To solve this issue, I went back to the "format picture" dialog and I changed the contrast on the Format tab to 85%. That was so much better! When I printed it out that time I could feel her big pointy ears, her legs and even the coloration of her head, which, of course, I can't feel on the actual dog. It was exciting to be able to see this part of her with my fingers after hearing about it from other people. Awesome!"

– Mike Sivill

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